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I guess Mike Huckabee is keeping his irons in the fire, should Sarah Palin decide not to run for President in 2012. But, the evidence against a Presidential run for Huckabee is apparent.

Mike Huckabee will visit six cities in Iowa and five in South Carolina during his upcoming book tour – one more sign that the former Arkansas governor wants to keep his name in the presidential mix for 2012 even as he enjoys the comforts of a lucrative talk show career.

The tour to promote his new book, “A Simple Government,” kicks off in Davenport, Iowa on February 27 and will take him to five more cities in the first-in-the-nation caucus state over two days: Dubuque, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Des Moines.

Huckabee will then travel through other states in the Midwest and south before heading to South Carolina for a two-day, five-city swing beginning on March 7. He’ll sign books in Florence, Columbia, Anderson, Greenville and Spartanburg.

That means Huckabee will be spending more than a quarter of his 40-city tour in two states that play a major role in determining who the GOP presidential nominee will be in 2012.

As I have said, the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination is Sarah Palin’s for the taking. But, should she not run, Mike Huckabee would be available as an alternative to Mitt Romney.

Plus, Huckabee gets to make some coin by selling books, while the pundits speculate on whether he will run for President.

And, most of the immigrants were illegal aliens to boot.

Over the past two years, as U.S. unemployment remained near double-digit levels and the economy shed jobs in the wake of the financial crisis, over a million foreign-born arrivals to America found work, many illegally.

Those are among the findings of a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data conducted exclusively for Reuters by researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Often young and unskilled or semi-skilled, immigrants have taken jobs Americans could do in areas like construction, willing to work for less wages. Others land jobs that unemployed Americans turn up their noses at or lack the skills to do.

With a national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, domestic job creation is at the top of President Barack Obama’s agenda and such findings could add to calls to tighten up on illegal immigration. But much of it is Hispanic and the growing Latino vote is a key base for Obama’s Democratic Party.

Many of the new arrivals, according to employers, brought with them skills required of the building trade and found work in sectors such as construction, where jobless rates are high.

“Employers have chosen to use new immigrants over native-born workers and have continued to displace large numbers of blue-collar workers and young adults without college degrees,” said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies.

“One of the advantages of hiring, particularly young, undocumented immigrants, is the fact that employers do not have to pay health benefits or basic payroll taxes,” said Sum.

From 2008 to 2010, 1.1 million new migrants who have entered America since 2008 landed jobs, even as U.S. household employment declined by 6.26 million over that same period.

These facts are something that will need to be addressed by my Congressman Elton Gallegly as he takes over the House Immigration Subcommittee.

Americans are out of work, illegal immigrations are displacing them in the work force because they work cheaper, and the immigration laws are not enforced while thousands of folks continue to come across the boader from Mexico.

Immigration will be a Congressional issue in 2011 and in the Presidential campaign in 2012.

The Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard testified in the trial of Mohamed Geele today.

Testifying in a terrorism trial, Kurt Westergaard said he feared he would be “slaughtered” by the 29-year-old intruder who stormed into the house on New Year’s Day, 2010.

“He was like a religious, insane young man. I believed he entered the house as a holy warrior who wanted to kill an infidel,” Westergaard told the court in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city.

Westergaard locked himself inside a panic room and escaped the attack unharmed.

The defendant, who cannot be named under a court order, told the court as the trial opened Wednesday that he just wanted to scare the cartoonist and didn’t intend to hurt him.

Westergaard said that was untrue, calling the defendant a “madman” as well as a “cowardly liar.”

Yeah, this moron enters someone’s home wielding an axe, hurls it at a police officer and it is presumed he just wants to scare the occupant.

A verdict in this trial is expected in early February.

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And, she won’t likely receive parole either.

A follower of Charles Manson who has been imprisoned longer than any other woman in California is facing a parole hearing on her conviction in the Sharon Tate killings.

Grey haired Patricia Krenwinkel, one of Manson’s two surviving female followers, has maintained a clean prison record in her four decades behind bars, but her chances for release appear slim following the parole officials’ rejections in other Manson cases.

Krenwinkel, 63, was convicted along with Manson and two other female followers in seven 1969 murders, considered among the most notorious crimes of the 20th Century.

None of those convicted has ever been paroled and one of them, Susan Atkins, died in prison last year after being denied compassionate release when she was terminally ill with cancer.

Leslie Van Houten, 61, the youngest of the women convicted was long thought to be the most likely to win eventual release. But she was denied a parole date last summer by officials who said she had not gained sufficient insight into her crimes.

Why?

Parole boards have repeatedly cited the callousness, viciousness and calculation of the seven murders committed by members of the Manson Family.

Krenwinkel admitted during her trial that she chased down and stabbed heiress Abigail Folger at the Tate home on Aug. 9, 1969 and participated in the stabbing deaths of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night, Both homes were defaced with bloody scrawlings. She was convicted along with Manson, Van Houten and Atkins. Another defendant, Charles “Tex” Watson was convicted in a separate trial.

All were sentenced to death but their sentences were commuted to life when the U.S. Supreme Court briefly outlawed the death penalty in 1972.

The crime scene photo tells it all.

As many political pundits predicted before the November 2010 elections, Pesident Obama’s poll standings and re-election endeavors would IMPROVE should the GOP take over the House and win more U.S. Senate seats.

The latest Gallup Poll reveals this – although American voters want Obama to move ideologically to the right.

Recent Gallup polling finds Americans believing Obama’s leadership could be stronger — particularly with respect to bringing about changes the country needs. Americans are nevertheless more optimistic than not that he will do better a better job over the next two years, even though half expect no change in his performance. In fact, they are more optimistic that Obama, personally, will do a better job than they are about the prospects for government as a whole.

The economy’s direction over the duration of his term will be a major factor in how the public ultimately regards Obama. At this point, Americans are nearly as optimistic about the economy as they are about Obama, with net optimism exceeding 20 points for each. While the president’s ability to directly affect the economy is somewhat limited, he will have more control over how Americans view his political ideology. The new poll suggests that he would fare best on that score by adopting more conservative policies, rather than adopting more liberal ones or even standing still. With Republicans wielding more power on Capitol Hill, that could also help Obama satisfy Americans’ desire that Republican and Democratic leaders focus on finding common ground.

How does this work for the GOP in defeating Obama in 2012?

History show us with Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996 after the GOP takeover of the House in 1994. Clinton’s move to the right and his triangulation worked.

Bill Clinton won his 1996 re-election easily.